non-local file system mounting? - BSD

This is a discussion on non-local file system mounting? - BSD ; Hi all,
Does anyone know of and regularly use any crypto-secured file system
access mechanism with FreeBSD as the server? Ie, is there some sort of
long distance/internet version of NFS or (at a pinch) SMB or something
else?
The ...

non-local file system mounting?

Hi all,

Does anyone know of and regularly use any crypto-secured file system
access mechanism with FreeBSD as the server? Ie, is there some sort of
long distance/internet version of NFS or (at a pinch) SMB or something
else?

The usual route for remote file access that I am familiar with is to set
up a VPN, and use a regular file system inside that. That usually
involves a bunch of painful routing and network configuration,
particularly when the client end wants to maintain connections to other
services at it's local end.

Something like an SSL/https connection would be perfect. Is WebDAV what
I'm looking for? Something based on SSH, maybe? Something as simple to
set up as rsync would be nice, but a live mount, rather than a one-shot
command.

If the client end can be OS-X, Windows and FreeBSD, that'd be perfect...

Cheers,

--
Andrew

Re: non-local file system mounting?

On Mon, 12 Feb 2007 12:14:54 +1100, Andrew Reilly wrote:
> Does anyone know of and regularly use any crypto-secured file system
> access mechanism with FreeBSD as the server? Ie, is there some sort of
> long distance/internet version of NFS or (at a pinch) SMB or something
> else?
[snip]
>
> Something like an SSL/https connection would be perfect. Is WebDAV what
> I'm looking for? Something based on SSH, maybe? Something as simple to
> set up as rsync would be nice, but a live mount, rather than a one-shot
> command.
>
> If the client end can be OS-X, Windows and FreeBSD, that'd be perfect...

After a bit of actual looking, I believe that I can answer this myself.
The client end wants fusefs-sshfs (which is a way to make sftp behave like
a mounted file system). This is in ports on FreeBSD, and is available on
OS-X thanks to some google folk who have made MacFUSE and sshfs.app. There
seems to be a commercial version for Windows called SftpDrive or similar.

I suspect that WebDAV is also a plausible answer, but while that might
make the clients simpler (both OS-X and Windows seem to be able to mount
WebDAV file systems natively, and ports has fusefs-wdfs) but this requires
installing and configuring apache, mod_dav and mod_encode, and it looks as
though some registry-fiddling might be necessary on Windows, to make it
use a compatible authentication system. Urgh. I hate configuring Apache.
Fusefs-sshfs requires no server-side configuration at all, assuming that
you already have sshd running (and who doesn't?)